Possessive Constructions in
Child German: Corpus Data
and Elicitation Games
Sonja Eisenbeiss (University of Essex)
Ingrid Sonnenstuhl (Duesseldorfer Akademie)
seisen@essex.ac.uk
Types of Possession
Adnominal Possessive Constructions (APCs)
Both Possessor (PR) and Possessum (PM) are encoded
within the same noun phrase (e.g. my/daddy’s chickens,
the chickens of our neighbours, …);
Predicative
The possessive relationship is encoded by a two-place
predicate such as have, own or belong or by be (e.g. I
have a dog. The dog belongs to me. This dog is mine);
“External”
The PR and the PM are realised as arguments of a verb
whose lexical meaning does not involve
Research Questions
• Is the full range of children’s forms and constructions
available early on and generalised rapidly (Full
Competence)? Or do children extend the range and use
of forms and constructions incrementally (Lexical
learning or Usage Based Approaches)?
• Do children acquire more prototypical uses of
constructions earlier than less prototypical ones?
• In which ways do children deviate from the target?
• Do children exhibit the constraints of the target language
early on?
• Can child data provide evidence about the nature of
constraints
German APCs
• pronouns
• prepositional constructions
• possessive pronouns
• ‘s possessives
• von ‘of’ PPs
• genitive constructions (not attested in early child
language)
• dative possessors (regional variant not investigated here)
Pronouns
Possessive Pronoun
(1) sein Freund
his
friend
‘his friend’
Prepositional Construction with Personal Pronoun
(2) ein Freund
von ihm
a
friend of
his
‘a friend of his’
Preferred when PR has been introduced or when PR is
1st/2ndPs.
-s
(3)
Pauls Freund
Paul’s friend
‘Paul’sfriend’
Restricted to unmodified proper names and
unmodified kinship terms that can be used like
names (e.g. Mamas ‘mommy‘s‘)
=> Syntactic or semantic restriction??? Can child data
help us to distinguish between these options?
von ‘of’
(4)
(5)
(6)
ein
Freund
von
Paul/seinem Vater
a
friend of
Paul/his
father
‘a friend of Paul’s’ / ‘a friend of his father’
? Das ist
bestimmt VON PAUL der
Freund
that is
surely OF
PAUL the friend
‘That is surely Paul’s friend’
? Von wem hast du
den Vater gesehen?
of
whomhave you the father seen?
‘Whose father have you seen?’
Preferred order PM < PR, but variation and
extractions sometimes possible
Data
Ann
And
Car
Han
Leo
Mat
I
2;4-2;5
2;0-2;1
1;11-2;0
2;3-2;9
II
2;6
2;2-2;3
2;1-2;2
2;10
III
2;7
2;4
2;3-2;5
2;11-3;0
IV
2;8-2;9
2;6-2;8
2;6-2;11
3;1-3;6
2;1
3;3-3;6
Sve
2;9-3;3
65 recordings from 7 monolingual German children
from the Clahsen and LEXLERN corpora
(Clahsen 1982, Clahsen/Vainikka/Young-Scholten 1990)
D-Elements in obligatory contexts: Hannah
100
80
60
40
20
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
overt D-element (quantifier, article,..) in %
overt D-element in formulaic utterances (in %)
D+N combinations (number of types)
8
Stages
I:
unpoductive use in formulaic utterances
and fixed D+N-combinations
II:
reanalysis
III:
development
IV:
productive use in obligatory contexts
=> no adult-like representations in early
stages
Types of APCs (Stage I-IV)
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
I
possessive pronoun
II
III
's possessive
IV
von-PP
Variation
• Hannah does not produce any APCs in I/II, but only
precursors, such as single-word utterances that consist
of the Possessor’s name or a possessive pronoun.
• Leonie does not use possessive pronouns in I
• Only Carsten, Hannah and Svenja produce von-PPs.
 no variation in order, but some children have an even
more limited range of constructions in early stages.
 availability of lexical items (e.g. possessive pronouns)
does not automatically lead to their use in an APC
Animacy in APCs (Stage I-IV)
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
I
self
II
human
III
animate
IV
inanimate
Types of Possessive Relations in APCs
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
I
ownership
II
kinship
III
body part
IV
part of object
Distinguishing Possessive Relations
III and IV: 10 utterances where a legal or habitual
ownership relation is encoded noun-phrase internally and
a temporary ownership or physical control relation is
encoded at the sentential level.
Mathias 3;4: der hat deine uhr
‘this-one has your clock’
Andreas 2;1: da Annette hat mei(nen) wasserball da
there Annette has my waterball there
=>
children start to distinguish between different types
of possessive relations.
Incremental Development
• no adnominal possessive constructions in early
stages for some children
• proper name possessives ≤ possessive
pronouns < prepositional constructions
• increase in proportion of pronominal possessors
• animate possessor < inanimate possessor
• ownership< kinship < body part < part of object
• evidence for distinction and combination of
possessive relations only in later stages
 incremental extension of the range of constructions
and possessive relations
 earlier emergence of prototypical possessive
relations
Constraints: The Development of -s
I:
no –s in obligatory contexts
II/III: initial restrictions of –s to high-frequency items
Leonie:
is mamis
is mommy‘s
Sonja:
Und welches ist Sonjas Auto?
and which one is Sonja’s car?
Leonie:
sonja autos
Sonja cars
IV: a few overgeneralisation to common nouns
(semantic violation), but not to modified nouns
(syntactic violation)
Examples of Violations for –s:
Leonie 2;4: affes banane
monkey’s banana ‘the monkey’s banana’
Leonie 2;7: clowns hut ()
clown’s hat ‘the clown’s hat’
Svenja 3;2: das is junges gürtel
this is boy’s belt ‘this is the boy’s belt’#
Semi-Structured Elicitation
• Encouraging speech production in a naturalistic (often
game-like) setting.
• e.g. eliciting complete sentences with the verb to give
in an "animal feeding game": participants have to feed
toy animals and explain which food items they would
like to give to which animals (Eisenbeiss 1994)
• often used as supplements to naturalistic data or
experiments
The Puzzle Task (Eisenbeiss 2009)
• a task with co-players:
child describes
contrasting pictures on
a puzzle board, adult
finds the matching
pieces, child puts them
into the correct cut-out
• exchangable pictures
and puzzle pieces
• can be used to elictit
particular forms or to
elicit the linguistic
encoding of particular
meanings
Elicitation: Possessive Constructions
• 10 monolingual German children (3-6 years)
• pictures: actions on body parts of animals (washing,
biting, object placement…)
• primary target: External Possession constructions
The giraffe is biting the rabbit on the ear
• secondary target: PP-APCs
der mund von der katze ‘the mouth of the cat’
Elicitation Material: bite
Elicitation Material: wash
Elicitation Material: put on
Elicitation: Initial Observations
• All children used PP-APCs
der mund von der katze ‘the mouth of the cat’
• Two children also produced:
• –s-overgeneralisations (katzes kopf ‘cat’s head’),
• compound nouns (katzenbauch ‘cat tummy’),
which are grammatical but dispreferred.
• Four further children produced compounds, but no
–s-overgeneralisations.
• None of the –s-Possessors was modified though all
children used modifiers with these nouns in other
contexts (von der Katze ‘of the cat’).
Work in Progress
•
•
•
•
•
genitive APCs in older children
dative APCs in other variants of German
micro-development
more studies on constraints on -s
child L2: are stages and acquisition orders due to
cognitive development, neural maturation, frequency?
• input: what determines which nouns are used with –s
• the frequency of –s inflected forms?
• the frequency or distribution of contrasts between
• inflected and uninflected forms (Leonie vs. Leonie‘s
• contrasts between modified nouns and unmodified
nouns in possession constructions and other contexts